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Axon Investigate provides a simple, fast and forensically-sound solution to video evidence challenges

Most investigators (94%) face technical challenges when trying to play video evidence, and many well-meaning investigators accidentally alter video evidence while attempting to play back thousands of proprietary file types. Video is the most prolific source of evidence available to investigators, but only when played correctly.

In late 2021, Axon acquired Occam Video Solutions and its flagship investigative software, iNPUT-ACE. Known for its thought leadership, forensic video experience, and industry leading video investigation software, the Occam team quickly became part of the broader Axon team.

Over the past few months, our development team has worked together, and we are pleased to announce that the popular iNPUT-ACE software has relaunched as Axon Investigate. 

Axon Investigate protects truth by providing an intuitive interface that unlocks the power of video evidence in an efficient, forensically-sound manner. A premium version of the software, Axon Investigate Pro, provides additional tools for video-centric investigations, including video enhancement, multi-clip time syncing, file stitching, narrative report creation, court demonstratives creation and more.

When investigators encounter proprietary files and formats that will not play on their devices, they frequently search for internet conversion tools to watch the evidence.


Unfortunately, many of these playback and conversion tools, (including the playback tools created by CCTV companies for their own files), alter or incorrectly play evidence files. Axon Investigate secures the forensic integrity of each video clip, enabling investigators to protect truth. 

With Axon Investigate, investigators can simply drag and drop proprietary video formats such as .DAV, .IRF, .EXE, .SSF and others, and accurately play this video evidence.

This confidence in accuracy goes all the way to the courtroom. Axon Investigate is built by a team of certified forensic video analysts and ensures that investigators share accurate digital evidence copies ready for court. Users can even bring Axon Investigate into the courtroom and play full screen, zoomed or looped video evidence for the judge and/or jury while on the stand.

Captain James Evans of the Racine County Sheriff’s Office (Wisconsin) explained, "Axon Investigate solved the issue we were facing with ease, this easily saved us many hours and added a layer of integrity we would not have had if we were forced to process the video another way."

Features of Axon Investigate that Help Protect Truth

Drag, Drop and Accurately Play Thousands of Video Formats
Investigators frequently encounter proprietary video formats such as .DAV, .IRF, .EXE, .SSF and others. With Axon Investigate, simply drag and drop thousands of video formats into an intuitive interface and accurately play important video evidence.

Batch Convert Proprietary Video to Standard Formats
Convert proprietary video files to standard output formats like AVI or MP4, without changing a single pixel within the images, so you can protect truth and maintain the forensic integrity of evidence. This feature is repeatable and can be batch processed on a large number of files.

Organize Video Investigations
Bring together video from multiple sources to tag relevant images, organize clips into groups, categorize metadata and uncover the full story by leveraging easy filter, sort and search functions. 

Support for New File Formats
Encounter a video file that will not play inside Axon Investigate? The Axon support team can parse individual streams of data from the video file and provide an “AceFormat” file that will enable Axon Investigate to play the video.

Identify Timing at the Frame Level
Many video formats record video with a variable frame rate, which can create challenges when trying to identify use of force or calculate the speed of a vehicle. Axon Investigate correctly handles timing at the frame level, providing greater accuracy for investigators.

Create Reports with the Narrative Report Tool (available in Pro)
Easily generate dynamic reports with embedded video clips and images contained within a single .PDF file, making it easy to share reports with other investigators or attorneys.

Produce Demonstrative Exhibits (available in Pro)
Highlight regions of interest, create side-by-side demonstrations, add automated on-screen text to show timecodes or other relevant information and more. Investigators, video and legal experts who testify about video evidence can even use Axon Investigate while testifying on the stand!

Track Suspects Across Multiple Cameras (available in Pro)
Quickly combine observations of a suspect from multiple camera views into a single video file – allowing the viewer to track a suspect’s actions chronologically without flipping between different files. These “stitched together” clips provide the court with a thorough account of a suspect’s actions from every camera view.

Camera Match Overlay (available in Pro)
Accurately calibrate and overlay video and imagery onto 3D point cloud data. The camera match overlay tool enables calculations that determine positions, distances, heights and other key measurements with your native 3D scanning software.

Analyze Compression Data (available in Pro)
Compressed video evidence is often misinterpreted due to limitations in compression technology. Video analysts can expose these limitations by visualizing the amount of compression in every area on an image and highlighting regions that may not be reliable.

Validate Chain of Custody and Video Accuracy (available in Pro)
Ensure investigators are prepared to testify accurately about all video evidence through a combination of features that enable the validation of video evidence, such as metadata analysis, hexadecimal analysis and hashing. 

Axon Investigate and Axon Investigate Pro are available today.

If you would like to learn more about Axon Investigate, contact us to request a demo at anytime or register for our upcoming launch webinar that takes place on November 3.

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Register for Axon Investigate Launch Webinar

Axon is pleased to announce that the popular iNPUT-ACE software has relaunched as Axon Investigate, an on-premise software solution that allows accurate playback of thousands of digital evidence file types.

Introducing Axon Investigate

ARTICLE: Introducing Axon Investigate

The pandemic pushed already-strained healthcare resources to their breaking point, leading to a sharp uptick in incidents of violence. In fact, 48% of nurses reported an increase in workplace violence in a 2022 survey. Now, hospitals are employing new tactics to confront the problem.

Axon has partnered with security leaders to provide a comprehensive playbook for preventing and addressing violent incidents in the workplace, as well as an overview of the financial and operational considerations of security strategy.

Workplace violence is on the rise. Healthcare workers are five times more likely to be victims of workplace violence than other workers in the US.

Inaction has financial ramifications. Workplace violence is a primary factor in workers fleeing the industry. Each percentage increase in RN turnover rates can cost a facility $270,800 per year — or save it if staff choose to stay.

Reactionary solutions are ineffective. Security leaders stress that technology prevents violence in healthcare, as TASERs successfully de-escalate 80% of situations without the need for force. Responding even the moment an incident occurs is already too late.

Axon_WhitePapers_WorkplaceViolence.pdf

Axon’s latest report provides a holistic strategy for addressing the rise of workplace violence in the healthcare industry. Read on to see how.

Workplace Violence & Hospitals: A Guide to Strategic Security Investment

ARTICLE: Workplace Violence & Hospitals: A Guide to Strategic Security Investment

Traditional law enforcement training methods are no longer enough. It takes constant training for law enforcement officers to perform at their best. But traditional training methods are costly and completed sparingly throughout the year. How do we solve this problem?

Axon believes there is an opportunity to provide accessible supplemental training that enables public safety professionals to develop into higher-performing officers. Axon VR represents the future of public safety training: immersive de-escalation training that will ultimately make both communities and public safety safer.

Axon VR Training brings innovative, wireless training to public safety that is easy to set up, scale and deploy anytime, anywhere. Axon VR Training prepares officers for complex, real-world situations through immersive scenarios that encourage critical thinking and de-escalation and enhance officer performance.

Axon VR features three core components: Community Engagement Training, Simulator Training and supplemental e-learning courses hosted within Axon Academy. 

Community Engagement Training focuses on developing skills, empathy and de-escalation tactics that allow officers to respond to complex real-world situations with new insight, awareness and perspectives.

Simulator Training enables officers to sharpen their skills on the firing range and practice de-escalation techniques in dynamic and realistic scenarios that require real-time assessment, split-second decision-making and use of TASER energy weapons and training firearms should a situation demand.

Axon Academy houses a library of supplemental e-learning content to strengthen skills taught in VR. After-action reports stored on Academy provide trainers with performance and progress metrics and new insight for coaching and program development.

Virtual Reality-based gaming is not a new concept to training.  Have you ever seen driving, flight or golf simulators? The concept behind gamified simulators is simple: by immersing people in a world where they can interact with equipment and complete tasks in an engaging and life-like way, they will be more capable of applying their knowledge and skills in the real world. Axon took this concept and developed TASER vs Zombies (TvZ), a VR game that uses VR controllers in a fun environment (a zombie apocalypse) to demonstrate the basic mechanics of TASER 7 energy weapons.

TvZ is designed to introduce participants to broad concepts like probe spread and the importance of time and distance in accurately deploying your TASER energy weapon under stress. 

Our second gamified VR experience, The Train, showcases the benefits of the Axon Ecosystem. It demonstrates how Axon solutions work together to ensure law enforcement personnel can get their jobs done effectively, efficiently, and, most importantly, safely. 

TvZ and The Train are games, and although not part of our current VR training offering, each includes educational components that help users better understand our technology and how it can help them in their work. 

Think about training wheels on a bike. Training wheels allow you to get comfortable with a bike’s look, feel and controls; however, they in and of themselves will not get you to the Tour de France. VR games are the same. They allow users to become comfortable with VR technology so that when they utilize true VR training, they are getting the most out of that experience. 

Public safety in the 21st century is complex. Officers face new challenges and encounters in the field every day. By continuing to innovate training technology, we can ensure that officers are set up for success in the field. We have the opportunity to nurture a generation of higher-performing officers. VR is the first step.

For more information on Axon VR, visit https://www.axon.com/training/vr

How Virtual Reality is Paving The Way For Better Outcomes

BLOG: How Virtual Reality is Paving The Way For Better Outcomes

Axon is proud to enter a bid for the military’s use of its critical Fleet 3 in-car video for the U.S. Army Installations Management Commanded competition. Axon Fleet 3 in-car camera system is a key component in the vision for building a secure military base of the future

Recently, in order to address growing concerns over base safety, including sexual harassment, non-combat deaths, and terrorism, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense in its FY23 markup included language to encourage the adoption of critical tools military police need in order to effectively manage base incidents.


“The [Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense] believes that the Army’s response to public safety failures at Fort Hood and elsewhere must not be subject to piece-meal investment efforts…Therefore, the Committee encourages the Secretary of the Army to establish a program to invest in public safety systems such as surveillance cameras, security systems, license plate readers, and analytic tools which were called out in theReport of the Fort Hood Independent Review Committee.”


Axon is committed to protecting our military service members and their families by providing military law enforcement with best-in-class situational awareness and analytics capabilities.

To this end, Axon is submitting a bid for a Fall 2022 competition to implement Axon Fleet 3 in-car video for military law enforcement vehicles and use our full ecosystem of law enforcement capabilities to support this critical mission. This competition is managed by the U.S. Army Installations Management Commanded (IMCOM) and could eventually lead to thousands of U.S. Army vehicles outfitted with Axon Fleet 3.

Expanding the use of Axon Fleet 3 in-car video to military law enforcement vehicles would, like body-worn camera technology, improve installation safety and reduce crime. Axon Fleet 3 is purpose-built to improve safety and protect truth, life, and justice on military bases. Built from the ground up with ethics in mind, the Axon Fleet 3 in-car video system features Axon’s AI-powered Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) software service that can be deployed and integrated on or off base along with real-time situational awareness through Axon Respond for Devices. This capability is currently deployed at law enforcement agencies across the country. 

Axon Fleet 3 will be a key tool for operators charged with maintaining a secure base in the days ahead.  It allows users to analyze information in real-time and record backseat car footage. This data is all uploaded into a secure database and can be integrated with Axon Evidence. Axon is already proudly supporting the U.S. Customs & Border Protection, U.S. Marshals Service, U.S. Park Police and other federal law enforcement customers with its suite of secure data capabilities. The Axon ecosystem is the only platform that allows for secure digital evidence sharing between local, state, tribal and federal law enforcement and U.S. Attorneys. 

In-car video is currently being piloted by the Department of Defense (DOD) – Mobile Federal Law Enforcement Enterprise Technology Service (MFLEETS), with plans to scale to a larger project with expanded in-car video capabilities. This is where Axon can help. With our state-of-the-art technology, expansive experience and integrated suite of products, Axon is set up for success in the military space. Axon Fleet 3 can make a difference toward protecting life, truth and justice.

As the military looks beyond MFLEETS, we are excited to partner with the Department of Defense in their efforts to deliver modern technology such as body-worn cameras to military law enforcement to match the capabilities of its federal peers and enable interagency operations. We look forward to seeing where this ecosystem technology takes military law enforcement nationwide in the coming months and years. 

Welcome to the Army Base of the Future - Axon AUSA Day 1

Axon is submitting a bid for a Fall 2022 competition to implement Axon Fleet 3 in-car video for military law enforcement vehicles.

From base security to advanced video and AI tools – Sept. 12, 2022

BLOG: From base security to advanced video and AI tools

From Base Security to Advanced Video and AI Tools: Axon Has The Capabilities to Build The Secure Military Base of The Future

In our multimedia, data-driven world, the interfaces used in emergency control rooms are becoming outdated. So much so that it’s time to find a new solution fit for the 21st century. So says Josh Pepper, Axon’s Vice President of Product Management, who leads the development of Axon’s solutions for operations and control centres.

Emphasising the need for a new approach to dispatch, Josh says: “I’ve banned the term CAD (Computer-Aided Dispatch) on my team. It stems from the 1960s and doesn’t make any sense anymore. It’s like saying ‘computer-aided Facebook’. There is no other Facebook, or dispatch. We need a whole new category.”

Indeed, dispatch seems decades behind in terms of technology. In daily life, communication via video, links, messages and photos is the norm, but control centres still largely rely on a ticketing system as well as radio. “It’s like sucking all of that information through a straw,” as Josh puts it. “Google Maps knows where you are, but 999 doesn’t in a lot of places. Being able to text the emergency services would just be the tip of the iceberg – we should be able to video call or FaceTime them as well, which would also give them much richer information.”

Alongside the need for a more information-rich, dexterous and modern interface to help control teams to make decisions, the public expects its agencies to be supported with the best systems available. However, as this review by the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch concludes, to date, there’s been a far greater focus on emergency medical response systems. It goes on to call for the optimisation of operations systems for both police and firefighting teams. 

Anyone who’s been in a dispatch room will recognise just how important it is in helping officers on the ground respond to incidents – a fact that’s vividly underlined by a recent experiment conducted by the University of Colorado in 2019. It showed that receiving accurate information from the dispatcher can be a matter of life and death: 62% of participants fired a gun in error when primed with inaccurate information, compared to 6% when given the correct facts.  

The experiment introduces the theoretical concept of cognitive heuristics, which looks at how different factors influence decision making when under pressure. It highlights the importance of accurate information at dispatch as it shows that police officers (like everybody else) are likely to interpret new events (for example, a suspect pulling a phone from his pocket) in line with their previously constructed interpretation (in this case, the dispatcher telling the officer that a gun was likely to be present).

While dispatch hasn’t evolved in step with technology over the last two decades, our understanding of how the brain works has. With advances in neuroscience as well as psychology, we have a much better understanding of what influences our decision making. Ultimately, this can help us to devise systems that optimise our capabilities for critical thinking.

Likewise, we’re also beginning to understand the limits of our ‘cognitive load’ and how going beyond it lowers our decision-making ability and causes stress. This is relevant for dispatchers, who still largely rely on radio to assess situations which can be especially challenging when streams of messages are being sent back from multiple officers in the field. It’s a noisy medium and, in addition to trying to process other data, the pressure on operators can be extreme. In fact, stress is thought to be a strong contributor to the high staff turnover in dispatch centres. This is estimated to be between 30% and 50% a year, underlining the need to find more effective ways to help operators work.

Referring to the use of radio for dispatch, Josh says: “It’s like trying to coach a football team over the phone – it’s difficult! With our real-time operations platform we’re looking at how we can put everybody involved in the decision-making process in the field of play – albeit virtually. We’re using video streamed from CCTV, bodycams and dashcams to enable operators to see what’s happening in real time. And we’re augmenting this view with data signals that can tell the dispatcher if an officer is standing, running or wrestling or if a gun is unholstered or TASER armed.” 

It’s now 20 years since the first TETRA and APCO-25 radio systems provided nationwide voice coverage for Public Safety teams. Over the time, dispatch processes have been refined. And the advent of new technology, including mapping and resource systems, has helped improve incident response. But in many ways, control centres have not kept pace with the technology evolution, especially around taking advantage of video, sensors from data, social media and much more. For Josh and his team, the opportunity to rethink dispatch was therefore hugely exciting. 

The team has been fortunate in spending time over the last few years with many agencies and in hitting the road with officers to understand what they need from a dispatch system. They then integrated the research into their real-time operations platform, which harnesses signals from sensors in the field, enabling users to “know before it’s voiced”, to coordinate responses and communicate more effectively. 

Josh concludes: “I wanted to start this project with the end in mind, which is giving everybody involved in the response to an incident a clear picture of what is happening on the ground. Digital technology is incredibly powerful and this is a great opportunity to put it into the service of public safety. We’re confident that we can transform situational analysis in a way that supports decision making and optimises incident response without overloading operators with too much data to process.”

ARTICLE: IT’S TIME TO RE-THINK DISPATCH

It's Time to Re-think Dispatch

Our latest body camera, Axon Body 3, recently launched. We continue to hear great stories from customers as it hits the streets, but we wanted to share some of our own stories from the path to launch. Today's post covers some of the breakthrough advancements in image quality. When you're done, keep scrolling for more articles with other inside peeks from the team.

It all started with a casual conversation in the spring of 2018, on a brisk day in Tampere, Finland. It went something like this:

“Sergeant Jones* said when he's reviewing body camera footage, he wants to be able to see the details in a single frame. Right now sometimes it's blurry when people are moving too fast,” said Jason Hartford, Axon's VP of DEMS & Devices, showing a couple examples on his laptop. “He wished it could be like a photograph instead.”

“That's interesting feedback,” said Juha Alakarhu, Axon's VP of Imaging and the leader of our newly-acquired Finland imaging team.

Then they went out for mustamakkara and moved on to other topics.

Jason had nearly forgotten about the exchange until a few months later, when he was once again visiting the team in Finland, and Juha said, “Come see this. I think it will help Sergeant Jones.” He proceeded to show Jason a new algorithm the team had created that shows a single video frame in vivid detail during playback, the blurriness nearly gone. Jason's mind was blown.

Juha and his team had been quietly confronting the issue of motion blur with a series of experiments and tests, recording themselves in graffiti-covered Finnish overpasses and custom-built imaging labs filled with props to help them see how the camera would record different surfaces and colors (plus a teddy bear or two). They are wizards when it comes to imaging technology, and what began as a high-level conversation about improving video quality had turned into a little bit of magic. But they weren't just making magic for magic's sake; they were careful to focus on only the most meaningful improvements for our police service customers.

You see, usually there's a trade-off between minimizing motion blur, and the camera's performance in low light conditions, when the majority of police video is recorded (about 58% is recorded when the sun isn't out, according to our analysis). Our Finland team was able to focus on what would matter most to officers: pull off a combination of great low-light performance and incredibly clear imagery, all without negatively impacting other aspects of the camera like battery life.

The left side shows a still frame without the algorithm, and the right shows it with the algorithm in Axon Body 3. 

Speaking of low-light: in other conversations our product team has had with agency partners, the issue of lighting is always something that rises to the top. In developing the Axon Body 3, the team was especially thoughtful about which technology to select to provide the best possible low light experience for our partners. They ran through many options for things like the image sensor and optics, as well as image processing and tuning. See, Body 3 had to perform better than previous models, but not better than the human eye, as officers don't always have the benefit of watching the captured video, and have to rely on what they see and perceive at the time. So the team spent a lot of time a lot of time testing the camera in different low light conditions and comparing the video to what they could see with their own eyes. Ultimately, the team went with the combination that was going to work best for typical police service conditions and produce a realistic presentation of the scene. So although you can certainly use your Body 3 for sightseeing around Tampere, it was purpose-built for police scenarios like going from a dark exterior to a home interior, adjusting quickly like the human eye and clearly capturing the details of the environment at hand.

Again, the left shows motion blur and greater darkness, while the right shows more detail with greater clarity of the Axon Body 3. 

In short, the quality of evidence that will be captured by Axon Body 3 is higher than ever before. That can mean the difference between a criminal being rightly convicted vs. wrongly set free, or an officer being celebrated as a hero vs. castigated as a bad actor. So while it may have started as just a brief conversation, we take this stuff incredibly seriously and are looking forward to hearing how better video impacts your officers and communities. 

So please, keep the feedback coming on this or any other Axon products you use. You never know what side comment or casual mention will inspire some truly magical advancements.

Axon Body 3, which will be launched in later 2019, makes breakthrough advancements in image quality that includes minimizing motion blurs and providing the best possible low light experience.

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News

Introducing Axon Investigate

Workplace Violence & Hospitals: A Guide to Strategic Security Investment

How Virtual Reality is Paving The Way For Better Outcomes

From Base Security to Advanced Video and AI Tools: Axon Has The Capabilities to Build The Secure Military Base of The Future

It's Time to Re-think Dispatch

The Making of Axon Body 3: Video Magic in Tampere, Finland